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Like Ophelia Dimalanta's feelings about Mondays, I have the same lingering feelings about Sundays.

Today is the last Sunday of the first month of the mystical year, one ending in 7 with all its connotations, its promises for a happy future, and its hold on all of us exiles in this land of the exiled.

It is late afternoon here, and the thick gray clouds create an overcast on the Waikiki waters, the spray starting two hours ago dampening the spirit of the promenaders on Ala Moana Road.

I remember the healing stones enshrined near the police station, the stones the giver of healing energies to the Tahitian healers who came by these islands long time ago but the memory is afresh.

I would not have known this shrine and its energies were it not for the healer Virgilio Apostol, an Ilokano American born in Los Angeles but has since taken on a path less travelled, following Gregory Speck and all those wise men and women and healers and magi and mystics who were so at home in their wayfaring aloneness, in their empowering solitude, in their attunement to the power of the universe to make us whole.

The Waikiki area is a mystery to me, and I do not go there.

There is that feeling of being lost, of being alone, of being disoriented that overwhelm me whenever I go there and I do not stay long enough to warm my feet with the warm sand and warm sea and warm surf. Last December, I tried to come to terms with that writerly feeling, and notebook and a good book in tow, I tried savoring my solitude amidst the crowd, gay and joyful, the children shrieking as if tickled by the salty wind tickling the blades of fronds, those luxuriant coconut tree leaves that jut out of castrated, flowerless, tall, and proud trees of the same name. Yes, in Waikiki as in all of Hawai`is public places, coconut trees are not permitted to become real coconut trees, their flowers nipped as soon as they jut out of their stalks.

The first time I came to Hawai`i many years ago, I had observed this, and curious of the kind of arboreal abortion that seemed to be common among all those tall, proud, and even phallic trees on the Alawai River, I asked my sister that one final question about the ontology of coconut trees: How come that they do not bear fruits?

My sister, a resident of the place for more than two decades, looked at me quizzically, unable to fathom perhaps why an elder brother like me, with a sufficient university education, cannot understand that in the interest of tourists who come to this place to splurge with their surging desire to make it here on an R & R and make that experience as some kind of a trophy for surviving a menial, 9-5 routine in the Mainland, those trees have to be rendered capon.

They sway with the wind still, the trees. And they retained the grace in their delicate dancing with the wind. But now, those rites of dancing for fecundity and fruitfulness have now rites to non-being, to the negation of their being coconut-bearing coconut trees.

I looked at my sister while she expertly navigated the three-lane Alawai Road that follows the contour of the Alawai River with its fresh water fish and green grasses on its banks. I looked at her quizzically as well, mentally telling her that I do not understand why the being and becoming of coconut trees have to be denied of coconut trees. I could not say that in words, subtly phrased or brutally expressed. I could be suspected of going bonkers.

I think about this experience now, and I think about the role of writers on Sundays, on days when we need to sit down and look at the blank screen and think of something meaningful to write, something relevant, something ennobling.

Unlike the castrated coconut trees, a writer cannot afford to offer himself or herself in this ritual sacrifice for and on behalf of tourists, even if these tourists are bringing in the cash. For a writer's role is to write and write well, write with urgency and seriousness, write with dignity and self-respect, write with freedom but with responsibility.

For a writer cannot be a despot with language--he simply cannot.

For the very act of writing, while it commences with a private solitary act in that sacred private moment when the writer catches the word to create a world, the fact that language can never be his private property renders his or her very act a public one, finally.

For a writer shares language with others, and as such, he or she has the duty to respect the collective character and integrity of that language that mediates his or her understanding of the people, of the world, of the universe.

It is in this light that no writer is ever given the right to tinker with language at will, subverting it without at the same time acknowledging his social and public responsibility. The talent of the writer is used in the search for the creative means through which the mediation of significant because ennobling human experience is made possible by language.

So on this Sunday, I tinker with language, coax it, and pray that I will make it through this moment of not being able to seize the sanctity of this late hour that the quietude in the campus proclaims.

Sundays are meant for prayers, and in my writing this, I hope I have done my prayers.

(Note: For many days on end, I was looking into my piles and piles of drafts, documents, diaries on paper napkins and bus tickets, and other assortment of papers torn from sides or edges of other papers. I took to Los Angeles some of these when I went home to the homeland last summer and then, with my writing life totally dependent on these, they were the first that I put in the post office media box and then shipped to Honolulu where I was to teach beginning Fall 2006.

In the hiatus between preparing modules for my class on Modern Philippine Film and writing abstracts for conference papers, with the conferences sprouting like mannagadu mushrooms in the July-August moonsoon of my unfinished storm country, I took a peak at these boxes now relegated to some sacrosant corner in my Waipahu place.

Lo and behold, this morning, I found this unfinished poem on EDSA Revolution I, the poem a subtle indictment, or so I hope, of what transgression and wastage the Cory Regime did to the grace and blessing EDSA People Power had given back to the masses of the Philippine people.

I look at the poem from a Lincoln Life insurance diary of 1991 and I count the years: 15 long years, the poem bearing the date 27 February 1991 right below the title, and in that uncertain parenthetical, written towards the last three pages of the diary courtesy of an insurance agent I had hoped to buy some life insurance from.

I tried to sense what the poem was and I felt a certain quality of unfinishedness in it: unfinished because it was probably scribbled during the abominable EDSA Revolution anniversary celebration where the big shots share the center stage while the nameless and faceless masses who braved the tanks and wrath of the powerholders remain incognito, back on the street, reduced as spectators of the glorification and self-gratification and self-promotion of the biggies, right on the EDSA stage built for a day in order to commit to elitist and burgis memory the elitist and burgis claims of the ruling elite and burgis class of the miserable and sad and sorrowful country.

We wait for the ceremonies to start & listen once again to the widow who promised revolutionin the rice bin & on the lunch platesof our yellowing children.

The widow, after sayingher prayers, her black ivory rosary on her convent hands,has gone to sleep.

Now she dreamsin full color, sometimes in sepia for nostalgiato account her lost days with her martyred loverhe who gave himself up, arms raised,in surrender to some good fortune and good fates some such histories decreed on the electin our country as is elsewhere.

Always, they capitalize on their martyrs'death, like the icons we bring aroundin the days of the holy weekwhen suffering is sacrifice is sacredwhile our own, more in number,lie in unmarked earth, alone with namelessness,not even a song or a poemor some good words for having fought to liveor for having lived to fight& then offering themselves for this good causeonly we the masses know.

They always win,them martyrs who calculate the profit marginsfor late heroism, while we the masses starve,negotiate with nightmares of food& the dire request of children for milk& they cannot sleep, the children & starvation is in their lipswordless beyond the smell ofa scoop of porridge& it is spilled in the way to where the EDSA ceremonies are turned into a spectacle blind the massesas the graceful dancers balancethe kinetics of hunger & the hungry& one paid singer on the stagesways her hips for one mezzo-soprano showmanshipthe masses will bring home as eternal memoryeven as the cooking pots remain cold,the singer's hips telling us she does not know how to wait for some gruelto forget the meaning of misery made holy.

Five years is like yesterday,the dustbin of memory being our name,& there we throw everythingso no one will accountb/c no one remembers.

We name our pains

alone.

We greet ourselves with the lonesomeness of grief.

We are to seek, we assureour clerics, them who do not knowwhy there is mannain the poor's absent meal.

We are to seek, we say again, and again,& they do not believe us,not a bit like a morsel of a stale breadwe could half or sharelike the way we did the first timepeople's revolution and hunger were twinsone February of our liberty.

So now they give us host instead,unleavened, white,gleaming,and full of promises.

Salvation is in the eating with finesse,they say, slowly, until you choketo your grace-filled death.

The poor could have been looking for a chaser from the mompo,that red wine of our thirst.

But the cleric takes one gulp alone:we are too damn many for the partaking.

There is hope in therefrom the emptied graves,like that of the one the messiah raisedfrom the living dead,like the messiah's as well,with the boulders openingto mighty little surprisesof flesh becoming porous, transcendent, delicate, beyond living.

There is no mortality in these festivitiesof the elect of the sad land.

There is only end,& in this anniversary & other anniversaries to comeof our usurped sacrificeswe ought all to come to grief.

The Nakem Conferences, under the auspices of the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai`i, is a collaborative program with other higher institutions of learning in the United States, the Philippines, and other countries. Commencing with the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference participated in by hundreds of scholars, cultural workers, creative writers, academics, civic and political leaders from the State of Hawai`i, the United States Mainland, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, and New Zealand, the Nakem Conference aims to:

• Bring into focus the various critical practices of the Ilokanos and the people of Amianan and abroad;• Reflect on these critical practices under the prism of the nexus of global cultures;• Reflect on the urgent need to affirm minority cultural and linguistic rights in the face of the hegemonic positioning of dominant cultures, languages, and critical practices; and• Draw up a dynamic discourse on the need to articulate the silences in the narratives of struggle and survival of the Ilokanos and the people of Amianan.

Host, Venue, and Date of 2007 Nakem Conference

While Nakem Conference is under the auspices of the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, its holding is always in partnership and collaboration with other organizations, individuals, and higher institutions of learning in the United States and abroad.

For the 2007 Nakem Conference, the host will be the Mariano Marcos State University System and the venue will be at this University’s main campus in Batac, Ilocos Norte, the Philippines.

The date of the 2007 Nakem Conference is May 22-25 as approved and scheduled by the joint technical panel of the MMSU headed by Dr. Miriam Pascua and UH-M’s IPDFP headed by Dr. Aurelio Agcaoili. In the same technical panel, Dr. Alegria Tan Visaya will chair the Philippine technical panel while Dr. Agcaoili will chair the United States technical panel. A joint panel from these two panels will administer the 2007 Nakem Conference.

It is proper and fitting that the Nakem Conference will go back to its roots in consciousness, culture, and creative potential—the Ilocos and Amianan as both territorial and psychic spaces—and its going back to the Philippines is a semiotic gesture demanded by the obligation to remembrance, memory, and memory-making and their power to instill in our cultures and communities—virtual and physical—to keep the creative collaborative anito alive.

Call for Collaborators, Partners, Volunteers, and Sponsors

Invitations have been sent to various organizations, academic institutions, individuals, and cultural leaders to take part as collaborators, partners, volunteers, and/or sponsors in the holding of this historic 2007 Nakem Conference—it is going to be the first time that it will be held in the Philippines after its inauguration in the United States as a gathering of scholars, academics, and cultural and community leaders.

Those interested to join as collaborators, partners, volunteers, and/or sponsors, in their individual and organizational capacity, should contact the respective chair of each country’s technical panel:

Beginning January 1, 2007, the joint technical panel will accept abstracts for presentation at the conference proper. All abstracts should deal on the theme, “Panagpanaw ken Panagindeg—Exile and Settling in Ilokano and Amianan History and Culture.”

Abstracts in Ilokano are welcome provided that each is accompanied by an English translation. Presentations in Ilokano and other Amianan languages are also welcome provided that such presentations, or the key aspects of such presentations, are translated in English.

While we encourage full and active participation from each one, the joint technical panel reserves the right to exclude abstracts and presentations that are deemed not in keeping with the conference theme or not in keeping with certain standards set forth by the same 2007 Nakem Conference Steering Committee and technical panel. This is to ensure quality discourses and scholarship in the Nakem Conference.

Topics and/or Themes

The following topics, themes, and researches are deemed of prior importance in the pursuit of the objectives of the 2007 Nakem Conference:

• Ilokano and Amianan Studies and the Question of Exile and Settling• Ilokano and Amianan Studies and Migration Studies• IAS and the Literatures of Exile and Diaspora• The Ilocos and Amianan as Tropes of the Nation/Global Nation • Critical Perspectives in Ilokano and Amianan Studies• Ilokano and Amianan Studies in the Regions• Ilokano and Amianan Studies and Philippine Diaspora Studies• Cultural and Linguistic Democracy and IAS• Approaches and Methodologies in the Promotion, Preservation and Production of Cultures from the Ilocos and Amianan• The Critical Tradition in Literatures and Cultures from the Regions• Ilokano as Lingua Franca and Basic Education• Ilokano as Lingua Franca and the Question of Governance• Ilokano and Amianan Languages and Liberation Pedagogy • Theatrical and Performance Arts: Preservation and Appreciation• The Visual Arts of Exile and Settling • Balikbayan as Settling Again: Narratives and Counter-Narratives• Ilokano and Amianan OFW Experience: Gender, Sexuality, and Freedom• Ethno-philosophical Excursus from the Ilocos and Amianan• Liberation Linguistics, the Ilocos, and the Cordilleras• The Amianan Languages and Cultural Practices: the Search for Connections

Postings for Updates

As in the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference, we are going to maintain the Nakem website administered by Dr. Raymund Liongson, Coordinator of the Philippine Studies Program, Leeward Community College, University of Hawai`i: philippinesonline.org/nakem.

Other postings and updates could be found at the MMSU website, the Timpuyog, and other sites dedicated to Ilokano and Amianan cultures, languages, and histories.

Conference Costs

The actual cost of the conference, to include registration, kits, lodging, and other incidentals, will be determined by the joint technical panel and will be posted in the appropriate various Nakem websites. A user-friendly registration form detailing technical requirements for registration will also be made available in these websites.

We can only borrow the Aramaic "Amen" here and we concur, with delight in our hearts, that indeed joy has come knocking on the door of this exile in the land of the exiled, and say this is true and tell it as such, and accept it as such, and seal it in truth and love and faith.

The particulars of this joy can only come when I began to abandon myself to this laughter that seldom resides in my migrant heart, although I know full well that its germ is in there, because, when the world is not agog with all the meaningless and the vacuous, I can laugh to my heart's content.

But for the last several days beginning the 30th of December--31st in the Philippines--when I began monitoring the New Year's day celebration in the homeland, the youngest daughter began to bombard me with her cross-examination, as if she were fathoming the idea why I did not come home when her two aunties, one from the Middle East, and another from Germany, came home to be with their families.

I had thought of blogging our exchange so that someday she would be able to read what transpired between us during the transit of 2006 to 2007.

On the road to work each day, and during my free hours, I think of our usual exchange that now borders on the comical, with the daughter displaying such an exuberance I have not known, her verbal ability more than what you can expect from a five year-old, with wit that can make her siblings, far older that she is, laugh and forgive and tolerate her.

She can be the reigning princess of sibling sarcasm when she wants it, with a sarcasm that makes them sit up and think and rethink, and finally say, "Oo nga pala, ano!"

But today's blog from her elder sister is a surprise. Read up and you will laugh, that laughter the beginning of your laughters to come for one full year.

Francine--her Ilokano name is Nasudi which translates to "pure, immaculate"--has been quizzing me whether I have gotten her card, that one that she herself has made and that she has sent through a friend who vacationed in the homeland but has yet to come back to Honolulu.

No, I said.

Magugustuhan mo, papa, she said, eagerly and with confidence.

I know, and I thank you, I said. When I get it, I will let you know.

Today, I have come to know of a bigger truth: that since Christmas, that little girl has been obsessessed with card-making.

Her sister Camille says Francine a.k.a. Nasudi makes cards day in and day out--and this one card that she made and is posted by her sister, is a clue to what has been going on in her mind these days.

The signs are there: airplane, the sea, the lands, the home, the numbers, her age, her name, the skies, and two two texts: Grow Op and Abnormal Psychology. Where on earth did she get all those terms?

She makes me laugh, this girl. You can see the card at: camillerocks.blogspot.com

(Note: I write these thoughts while waiting for the midnight hour to strike the first hour of the new year. There is noise all around, and fireworks of all kinds lit the starless sky, the fireworks becoming instant stars whose quicksilver promsie of light is entinguished not long after these are ignited and sent to soar in the heavens. I think of home, the homeland, and countrymen. I think of all the motions that go into this facetious rite, one that is literally empty. Then again, we have to look for meaning even when there is none, and I wrote this piece to fulfill that obligation, hoping that the new year comes with its freshness, its novelty, its new promise of hope.)

Your first New Year in Oahu, this 2007.

You stand at the corner of Hoaeae and Hanowai at this midnight that the last clock of December gives in to the first hour of January. The gathering noise from firecrackers lighted all around gives a cover to your unnamed pain as a voluntary exile. In this corner, one of the highest elevations in Waipahu, you see the outline of Pearl Harbor. With the quick glow of costly fireworks that by Chinese thought are meant to drive away the evil spirits, you usher in new thoughts and the best of good luck for the coming year. In this place, you witness for the first time the exchange of sights and sounds from all directions, the display in the ground and in the sky spectacular, the sound a boom beat that is capable of breaking the eardrums. When you were young, you remember your father, your two younger brothers and you gathered on a hilltop with your home-made bamboo cannon with the gunpowder. The boom the crude instrument created was sufficient to welcome the innocent years of your young lives, you and your siblings, some innocence your father helped cultivate.

Oahu, the island you are residing in now, is “the gathering place” in the Hawaiian language.

Kings and rulers and their handpicked supporters came here a long time ago to meet up and decide on important issues concerning the islands before some power-holders and power-trippers decided that these islands belong to some other more powerful dream beyond these islands. It is the dream of a new empire, a new manifest destiny, a new mission on spreading democracy so that capital can get into the coffers of investors and industrialists and their allies.

The power is that one of imagination—and the imagination of the borderless reach of commerce and profit and the extension of an empire so other nations would know that a newly-born empire is about to declare its military might. This is your United States Mainland with its expanding vision of what a powerful nation ought to look like and behave politically, geographically, and commercially.

Oahu in these islands promises an ultimate insular life, an insular fever. It is your quintessential barrio life in the Ilocos, the life with its share of inconsequential people with their penchant for easy sensationalism. The easy sensationalism is calculated to pursue their career for self-importance, to magnify their smallness, and to advertise their lack of grace by passing it off as their own self-defined version of magnanimity of spirit. The easy targets are those with more brilliant ideas, the ideas the ones these inconsequential people cannot have precisely because they cannot fathom them. So they go mercenary, in a manner that is artsy but ultimately artless by decapitating others. That done, they do rise, and rise to quicksilver stardom like these little stars the fireworks create for our eyes to see for a quick second and they are gone.

You smile the smile of someone who cannot believe what you are seeing. You raise your arms in the air, in total surrender to all the forces of life that make it certain that things go by the edict of some grand story somewhere, the story by someone grander that anyone of the small and little men and women and children that we all are. We are, simply put, a speck in the universe, an almost invisibel dot in the whole schemata of things and the sooner that we realize this, we do not go by Jose Garcia Villa's man who challenges his creator.

Think positive, you tell yourself, recalling Norman Vincent Peale’s feel-good advise in the 70s when your homeland was in quandary because everyone was promising a good society for everyone and not only for some residents of some fancy palaces of power. Include their cohorts and you have a cabal of bastards shanghaiing the basic human rights of cowering Filipinos. The fact that some good-for-nothing Ilokano writers chose either to become allies to this cabal of bastards or to remain silent is one for the books. But those were interesting times, and we all were living in those interesting times—or at least we were pretending to live normal lives. Oh, the rewards for court-jesting were great, insurmountable. And those who got some of the crumbs of power and court-jesting are still around, tormenting us with their holier-than-thou attitude.

What am I doing here in this transition time? you ask yourself.

You understand that there is a problem with your figure of speech here, but this is the tropics, and the tropic requirement for a kind of writing in your mind accepts the metaphor. The abominable writers with their abominable cowardice will not catch you. You are taking the liberty to get mixed up with your mixed metaphors. You tell yourself that this is the time for renewal, for molting, for leaving all the negative thoughts behind, throw them to the wind so that the strong and fierce wind would carry them away, to the vast waters yonder, to the heavens that can give the proper absolution for all your errors and deficits in the heart.

You gather yourself in this noise, in the din, in the dim, in this spectacle that comes to this place only once a year. Hawaii is the last place in the whole world to welcome the New Year, you remind yourself. Your family back home has celebrated it and the wife must have accounted the bills that she hang on her curtains to welcome the promise of good wealth and good vibes, she being some twenty-five percent Chinese through her mother’s bloodline. And with your bloodline of brown Chinese in the Ilocos, your household must really be creeping with a certain degree of Chinese-ness, what with the ubiquitous atang—the food offering—you asked your wife to do in remembrance of the anitos and all the spirits of the universe including the spirits of the dearly departed, in thanksgiving as well for the old year, and in welcoming the new year with its mystical significance, with the seven at its end.

So many thoughts come to you, in ripples, in profusion, in downpour, as if waves and sweat and rain are all coming together in a number of seconds that you watch one huge lighted fireworks, the one looking like a huge intestines, one end tied to a pole, the other down on the ground, and as soon as it is lighted, the sparks come in like a dancer in a trance, and the boom coming in quick steps, the sparks and the boom creating an accapella of primal rhythm you remember for the many new years you have witnessed, the last four in these faraway land.

The good thoughts are many, with Sinamar Robianes Tabin calling you to say hello, and greet you with the best thoughts for the New Year and telling you of the need to move on, go on, and pursue to the end one dream that is not for the pursuers but for the generations that will come after them. You return the greeting back, promising your gifts, your assistance, your love for the language and the culture of the people whose abode you come from, the abode of their spirits, the indwelling of their souls. “I have with me the hymn for the group,” says she at the other end of the line some miles away into the deep of the white Christmas country, out there in the big Salt Lake City, not the same named smaller city you have in Oahu but somewhere in the heart of Utah where Filipinos are now going and settling and building lives, inspite of the snow and the long nights of the winter season. "Nakalamlamiis itatta," she tells you, and you imagine her and Manong Loring Tabin all bundled up, with the thermals and the heavy jackets, and their lips on fire, with the smoke of the cold air coming between the teeth that clatter once in a while. You know there is the hearth, the fireplace in those postcard perfect houses. But the heat of the tropics is not the same warth you all remember, you who have chosen to leave the homeland, enamored by the kind thought that you will somehow build a life in strange places. Or so you dream, and dream big.

You look at the lights in the night sky, the lights banishing the darkness for a time, and then the starlings come in quick brilliance, stunning you, rendering you awe-struck and thinking, “How could they have thought of making small joys and spectacles out of gunpowder?” You could have been more ethnically appropriate, “What wisdom was there among the Chinese that they have known the magical powers of fireworks upon a sad, exilic heart?”

There is that euphoric feeling in there, and your pulse beats faster, that same feeling that you have got when you have confirmed that genuine comradeship of friends of the pen.

You keep their names in your heart, believing that their names are all-too sacred to be pronounced or mispronounced. You know that are people like that, revered and respected in silence because they deserved all of the reverence and respect, in fullness and in that quietude you cannot deny, in that quietude that language is full and entire, and lying and pretensions are not possible.

The smell of gunpowder gets into your lungs now. You walk around, and the spectacle of this evening gets to heat up, with the night sky now filled with all the sparkling lights.

With that feeling of euphoria now slowly being exiled, you connect with the universe and all the exiles all over the world, all the Filipino exiles in more than one hundred twenty countries, and say a little prayer for their families and loved ones. You see a million like you, you hear them, you imagine them, you have them in your mind—and you can only heave a deep sigh.

With the New Year, you remind yourself, hope springs eternal. A clique, but it is eternal and true.

The new in the new year is hope, that virtue that shields us all from the hurly-burly of the everyday. The news here in the United States is not good either, with wars the country is involved in weighing it terribly down. There is a certain cynicism now, as is that feeling when, in April 2003, the Bagdhad objective was called for and pursued. I was quite new to this country then, and I did not know much about this aggression and agitation while the whole country was reeling from the aftermath of the New York debacle. Despite our living in difficult and interesting times, there is reason to hope, as this hope guides us to follow where the path may lead us to something with clarity and care--the clarity of our purposes, for ourselves and other people, and the care with which we are to temper these purposes.

The first day of each year is always a mixture of feelings for me--and in exile, this mixed bag of emotions get to intensify, uncertain whether to linger in my room for a while and do some brushing up with my reading and research--yes, I do them at the same time, as is the expectation of university teaching everywhere--or shake off the dust of the old year, pat myself a bit, and run to where the wild forest is.

So I drive and drive to wherever the spirit leads me.

Today I am just in touch with my feelings, turning the steering wheel where that sense tells me.

To the foot of the Tantalus first, I tell myself.

Tantalus is that mountain that I see from my window and overlooking the vast Waikiki sea.

Which I do now, gassing up a bit some five miles more beyond the speed limit but careful that I am not overspeeding, an act I cannot stand, and an experience I cannot forget when living in the US Mainland and I had to navigate the distances between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Los Angeles and everwhere we would fancy on when we have some days in our hands--some days to get away from all the heaviness of daily living as immigrants. There is a rich symbolism here, this constanct movement, this constant running away from the arid nooks of your domicile that reminds you that in these are the uncertainties that need not be said, that should remain in their silences and mutedness, to keep you sane.

Those who have not experienced how to live so far away from the homeland might look at the migrancy experience as a romantic going away to a far-flung place to earn all the dollars you can lay your hands on, scoop them with ease, and send them with gusto to the waiting family and relatives back home. No sir, no madam, life is as tenuous over here as in the homeland, and the sacrifices are probably more, with the pillows wet in evenings when sleep does not come to you right away because the thought of your family so far away, so near in your heart and yet so far from you, comes as a torment.

So drive I did, and to the foot of the mountain.

I get in touch with my feeling and I am driving to the Ala Moana now, on Nimitz, past the airport.

I get past the piers, so solemn in their inactivity during the holidays, with the ala-Titinic luxury liner Pride of Hawaii docked on Pier 14, its bow tied to some posts, its movement on the water so still you can see peace on its huge and imposing structure. Someday, I tell myself, I will get onto it, and cruise and cruise to my heart's content.

I drive past the immigration office, past the row of commercial establishments that are now busy with shoppers. In a little while I reach Waikiki shore and there, I look at the thousands of families in their picnicking and memory-making, with the children shrieking with delight as they hit the cool waters or run wild in the sand or hit the ball with their parents on the grass. What a sight, and my heart melts.

Take courage, I tell myself.

I take out my tatami mat I bought from a Japanese specialy store and which I always keep with me. But today is the first time that I ever gather the strength to unroll the mat, have it spread on the verdant grass, and lie on my back to watch the grey clouds go by. There is drizzle but I do not mind, as all the others do not mind. Drizzle in the new year is for good luck. After some time, the sea wind blows it away, to the mountaintops in the north, to the Tantalus side, to the Ala Moana valley, to the valley of rainbows.

I go back to the car and retrieve the books I have started reading but have yet to speed-read so I can get to have a handle of what they are saying. There are so many books in my car that it has doubled as a mini-library. Previously, it has served as a mini-closet: jogging pants, shorts, and jackets. Some kind of a kitchen is there as well: bottled water, Pringles, and tea drink--all needed after some exercise. I remember that I have not changed a lot from my Philippine ways: my car in the homeland had all the test papers, term papers, and creative works of my students, that there was hardly any room for the grocery.

I started to read Elredge again; and Freire and Burke are close by. I am on topics that seem to be poles apart, Elredge on the power of story and our connection with the story-maker; Freire on language and reading and liberating education; and Burke on a personal account of his journey in a wild river. Ha! I am finishing Elredge now and I marking the pages, hoping to come up with some notes on a 5 X 8 in the future, a deed every researcher ought to do for what is called 'scholarship.' It is being honest with your sources--it is intellectual integrity, a key concept in university career and intellectual life.

I look all around me: there is crisp laughter, there is that guffaw in its intense tone, there is that abondonment to laughter and joy and celebration. Each one is happy at this happiest of hour, on a bright and sunny and gay noon in the Waikiki area. And I am alone.

I pray: give me courage. I say "Om, Om, Om." I repeat this exercise, and I get in touch with my aloneness, ala-Rod McKuen, a songwriter of the Beatles.

I begin to be conscious of my breathing, the exhaling and inhaling now a ceremony of some sort, a ritual to recognizing the beauty of life despite your being alone in a crowd. Waikiki during the holidays is a crowd and you have no business going there alone if you did not want the feeling to get to pierce your heart.

But I like to be alone, I tell myself. And I really do--as all writers must realize now, since aloneness is what makes them write. For poets, that aloneness is even worse because it has to have its surname: the poet is not to be only alone but he must also be terribly sad to be able to write a good poem. Otherwise, what that pretending poet has got is an empty bluff, a pfffft. We write good poems because we are sad, so deeply sad. Precisely.

I shake the dust off my jacket and pants; I leave the sea.

I drive to the west to hit back to the freeway, on Nimitz, and there, lo and behold, there is that rainbow so beautiful in its Benetton colors, its colors the crayola of my youth and innocence, its hue the watercolors of my fathering days, with two children coloring everything including our house's concrete walls. I recall Noah and the deluge--and I recall the promise of Yahweh to the people, the Yahweh as the Birther of the Cosmos, the Birther of Life--the Yahweh as "Avon dvashmayya."

I feel God looking at me, and in God's aloneness, I have company.

I hit the freeway, and go east to exit to the foot of the Tantalus. On University Avenue, another rainbow shows up, bigger, its colors more solid as it is nearer, and with the huge mountain range as the background, I feel I am looking at a still life created by a landscape artist.

This is not for real, I tell myself. I look to my left as I speed up a bit and I can see clearly the end of the bow. I look to my right and I can see the other end of the bow. I am close to the rainbow now, and I am getting closer and closer. As soon as I hit the foot of Tantalus, the rainbow becomes porous, the colors faint, and the closer I get to it, the more the colors get fainter and fainter until, on another closer look, the rainbow fuses with the scene and the afternoon light. I only see now a faint outline.

I tell myself, this is a good sign, one of hope. On the first day of January, I do not see only a raibow but two rainbows, their brilliant colors giving me a clue of the brilliant days ahead.

I have to hope--and I have to pray and hope, I promise myself.

In the late afternoon of getting it touch with myselft, I am ready to head back home and do my writing, the act of writing celebrating in joy and freedom my aloneness.

I am blessed, I tell myself. I cannot ask for more.

Before sitting down to write, I take the clear bowl of water, take it to the sink, and throw the old water away. I wash the bowl and put a fresh water on it. I put it back on a corner I declared sacred.